William Henry Harrison and Me
Both Geni and WikiTree show that I’m connected to President William Henry Harrison. I’m going to explore each of these connections in turn.
At first, the Geni connection looks pretty good through the Wyckoff family (Susannah Wyckoff, sister of my 5th great-grandmother Elizabeth (Wyckoff) Workman. I wrote about them in last week’s essay on Martin Van Buren. But I encountered a problem – I couldn’t find any evidence that Elizabeth actually had a sister named Susannah. Geni makes the connection by using three unsourced family trees, and I can’t find any document that says she existed.
Ancestry was no help, and Wikitree didn’t provide any guidance either. I found William Samuel Francis (on the far right in the second line in the chart above) but I couldn’t find any evidence that he was married to Susannah Wyckoff. Both Ancestry and WikiTree show him with only one marriage, and it’s not to Susannah Wyckoff.
This is a shame, really. If this line had proved out, I would have been able to connect to the powerful Carter family in colonial Virginia. But it was not to be.
The WikiTree connection looks a little more promising. This connection appears to traverse the Botts/Gaines family line that has connected me to President James Madison and President James Monroe. I wondered if this line would prove out.
TL/DR: It doesn’t work. The problem is with #8 Richard Gaines; his mother was Isabella Pendleton, not Jemima Pendleton, and I can’t find any connection to Martha Ruffin to make the link to the rest of the tree. None of the WikiTree profiles for this connection have any sources that prove the link, so I think I have to give up this connection as well.
Geni suggests one additional connection, as shown on this chart.
This is just so unlikely. Thomas Spencer, Esq. (on the right end of the third line) is identified as my 12th great-grandfather, born in Warwickshire, England, in 1472. The sources to support this are weak indeed – a whole lot of unsourced family trees and a couple of documents here and there. I clicked around WikiTree a bit to see what I could find, and did a few Ancestry searches to see what I could tease out, but there are just too many years and too few documents to make this work out.
Stike Three and I’m out!
This is the first president I have failed to prove at least some degree of connection to. When I get to his grandson (the 23rd president, Benjamin Harrison) I find a connection through the Mormon polygamist John Lee (see my essay on my secondary connection to President James Madison). This provides a kind of backward connection to President William Henry Harrison through his grandson; I’ll write about that in the 23rd week of this project.